Located in the popular beach town of Oiso, an hour south of Tokyo, a restored traditional Japanese home has huge windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a triple-height ceiling in the living room, where heavy black pine rafters intersect with slender bamboo beams. In the garden, a picturesque thatched hut overlooks a rotenburo outdoor bath.
Such details may sound desirable, but not to many Japanese home buyers: Built in 1867, the house is on the market with Sotheby’s International Realty for $1.3 million, or $1 million less than owners Keiji and Atsuko Suzuki paid for it in 1997. The depreciation reflects Japan’s long-moribund real-estate market, but it also reveals how little demand there is for traditional, handcrafted homes.
Japanese home design is admired everywhere in the world—except in Japan. The aesthetic of minimalism, clean lines and natural wood is usually rejected in favor of brand-new, factory-built concrete boxes. Across the country, classic wooden houses called minka, or “people’s houses,” built prewar using immaculate Japanese carpentry, lie empty and rotting, abandoned by a declining population and rebuffed by city dwellers who gravitate to cheaply-built, mass-market housing.
Now, minka are getting another look from a younger generation that prioritizes energy conservation, sustainability and traditional crafts. One increasingly popular solution is to dismantle minka, move them from their original, often remote, locations and rebuild them with modern facilities somewhere new.
The government will launch a searchable database of empty houses this year—there are 211,437 empty minka in Japan, according to a 2015 report by the Development Bank of Japan—as well as “a ¥50-billion public-private fund to invest in old houses,” says Nobu Takahashi of the Japan Minka Revival Association. The percentage of households buying existing homes is predicted to rise to 48% in 2030 from 29% in 2015, according to the Nomura Research Institute. In comparison, nearly 90% of sales in the U.S. are of existing homes.
Architects who specialize in relocating minka say business is picking up. German architect Karl Bengs says he has relocated, rebuilt and sold more than 40 minka. After a career spent trying to fathom why Japanese people “travel to see old buildings in England and Italy” but then “destroy everything in their own country,” he says he believes attitudes are changing, particularly among young people.
One of Mr. Bengs’s clients is Alasdair Pitt, an English lawyer for an international bank who relocated a house in the mountains of Niigata prefecture. The 1,886-square-foot-home, which has a steeply-pitched roof to keep off the snow and a classic timbered exterior, cost $263,000 to relocate and renovate in 2005. “It is far easier to love this type of building than a modern condominium, as it connects more closely with the human soul and with surrounding nature,” says Mr. Pitt, 47.
Minka are popular with foreign buyers in some areas, like the historic city of Kyoto. “It takes a foreigner to see what the Japanese are losing,” says Phillip Peatey of Burchill Partners, an Australian real-estate company, who has lived in Oiso for more than 30 years. Traditional houses began to be knocked down in favor of an ugly modern sprawl about 20 years ago, he says. His wife’s family’s home is “the last of the original old houses of Oiso.”
Down the road from that home lives Tsuguo Tada, an art book publisher, in a rebuilt farmhouse that he found 23 years ago “deep in an isolated valley,” north of Tokyo. “I hired a carpenter and we numbered every piece of wood and brought it to Oiso. It was a very unusual thing to do at the time.”
Keiji and Atsuko Suzuki at their restored traditional Japanese property, which is on the market for $1.3 million.
The timbered cottage is straight out of a fairy tale, with walls of white plaster and wooden beams, set in a small Japanese garden. Its interior is atmospheric, with a dark wood floor and high timbered ceiling. A pioneer of the relocation movement, Mr. Tada believes there is now a “rebirth of interest in traditional architecture; more people are starting to choose to live in old houses rather than throw them away”.
People who choose to relocate a minka should allow up to two years from purchase to completion, says Osamu Akasaka, who runs the Kanazawa Architectural Design Office, which specializes in moving old houses. The cost, he says, is typically $200 to $325 a square foot to buy, move, rebuild and refurbish a minka—roughly similar to the cost of building a new home.
After they’re completed, minka will likely drop in value—but that is the case with any home in Japan. Messrs. Pitt and Bengs argue that restoring old houses could halt the depreciation trend; many new houses are so poorly constructed they are considered worthless after a few decades.
Zoe Ward of Japan Property Central, a Tokyo real estate agency, is marketing a grand old house in Hakone, a popular vacation area near Mt Fuji, for $13.2 million. According to the Canadian owner, the 4,090-square-foot, four-bedroom home was moved from another prefecture 90 years ago.
A mile down the road sits another relocated house, this time with a modern extension built in 2009. The original house was moved in 1971 from Gifu, a mountainous area in central Japan, and the original wooden beams, staircase and irori fireplace—a square firepit in the floor traditionally used for cooking—remain. The 1,722-square-foot, three-bedroom house is listed with Sotheby’s International Realty for $463,000.
Yasuhiro Yamashita of Atelier Tekuto, a cutting-edge Tokyo architecture firm, used timber from two 100-year-old warehouses to build a weekend home for clients near Kamakura.
“After the war we developed a Westernized culture and got used to throwing things away and buying new things,” Mr. Yamashita said. “And now we look back and realize what we lost.”
(Source: WSJ)
Such details may sound desirable, but not to many Japanese home buyers: Built in 1867, the house is on the market with Sotheby’s International Realty for $1.3 million, or $1 million less than owners Keiji and Atsuko Suzuki paid for it in 1997. The depreciation reflects Japan’s long-moribund real-estate market, but it also reveals how little demand there is for traditional, handcrafted homes.
Japanese home design is admired everywhere in the world—except in Japan. The aesthetic of minimalism, clean lines and natural wood is usually rejected in favor of brand-new, factory-built concrete boxes. Across the country, classic wooden houses called minka, or “people’s houses,” built prewar using immaculate Japanese carpentry, lie empty and rotting, abandoned by a declining population and rebuffed by city dwellers who gravitate to cheaply-built, mass-market housing.
Now, minka are getting another look from a younger generation that prioritizes energy conservation, sustainability and traditional crafts. One increasingly popular solution is to dismantle minka, move them from their original, often remote, locations and rebuild them with modern facilities somewhere new.
The government will launch a searchable database of empty houses this year—there are 211,437 empty minka in Japan, according to a 2015 report by the Development Bank of Japan—as well as “a ¥50-billion public-private fund to invest in old houses,” says Nobu Takahashi of the Japan Minka Revival Association. The percentage of households buying existing homes is predicted to rise to 48% in 2030 from 29% in 2015, according to the Nomura Research Institute. In comparison, nearly 90% of sales in the U.S. are of existing homes.
Architects who specialize in relocating minka say business is picking up. German architect Karl Bengs says he has relocated, rebuilt and sold more than 40 minka. After a career spent trying to fathom why Japanese people “travel to see old buildings in England and Italy” but then “destroy everything in their own country,” he says he believes attitudes are changing, particularly among young people.
One of Mr. Bengs’s clients is Alasdair Pitt, an English lawyer for an international bank who relocated a house in the mountains of Niigata prefecture. The 1,886-square-foot-home, which has a steeply-pitched roof to keep off the snow and a classic timbered exterior, cost $263,000 to relocate and renovate in 2005. “It is far easier to love this type of building than a modern condominium, as it connects more closely with the human soul and with surrounding nature,” says Mr. Pitt, 47.
Minka are popular with foreign buyers in some areas, like the historic city of Kyoto. “It takes a foreigner to see what the Japanese are losing,” says Phillip Peatey of Burchill Partners, an Australian real-estate company, who has lived in Oiso for more than 30 years. Traditional houses began to be knocked down in favor of an ugly modern sprawl about 20 years ago, he says. His wife’s family’s home is “the last of the original old houses of Oiso.”
Down the road from that home lives Tsuguo Tada, an art book publisher, in a rebuilt farmhouse that he found 23 years ago “deep in an isolated valley,” north of Tokyo. “I hired a carpenter and we numbered every piece of wood and brought it to Oiso. It was a very unusual thing to do at the time.”
Keiji and Atsuko Suzuki at their restored traditional Japanese property, which is on the market for $1.3 million.
The timbered cottage is straight out of a fairy tale, with walls of white plaster and wooden beams, set in a small Japanese garden. Its interior is atmospheric, with a dark wood floor and high timbered ceiling. A pioneer of the relocation movement, Mr. Tada believes there is now a “rebirth of interest in traditional architecture; more people are starting to choose to live in old houses rather than throw them away”.
People who choose to relocate a minka should allow up to two years from purchase to completion, says Osamu Akasaka, who runs the Kanazawa Architectural Design Office, which specializes in moving old houses. The cost, he says, is typically $200 to $325 a square foot to buy, move, rebuild and refurbish a minka—roughly similar to the cost of building a new home.
After they’re completed, minka will likely drop in value—but that is the case with any home in Japan. Messrs. Pitt and Bengs argue that restoring old houses could halt the depreciation trend; many new houses are so poorly constructed they are considered worthless after a few decades.
Zoe Ward of Japan Property Central, a Tokyo real estate agency, is marketing a grand old house in Hakone, a popular vacation area near Mt Fuji, for $13.2 million. According to the Canadian owner, the 4,090-square-foot, four-bedroom home was moved from another prefecture 90 years ago.
A mile down the road sits another relocated house, this time with a modern extension built in 2009. The original house was moved in 1971 from Gifu, a mountainous area in central Japan, and the original wooden beams, staircase and irori fireplace—a square firepit in the floor traditionally used for cooking—remain. The 1,722-square-foot, three-bedroom house is listed with Sotheby’s International Realty for $463,000.
Yasuhiro Yamashita of Atelier Tekuto, a cutting-edge Tokyo architecture firm, used timber from two 100-year-old warehouses to build a weekend home for clients near Kamakura.
“After the war we developed a Westernized culture and got used to throwing things away and buying new things,” Mr. Yamashita said. “And now we look back and realize what we lost.”
(Source: WSJ)
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